Chapter VIII: An Arrival (10)

“Didst thou not die for them, Jesus, my Jesus――for them as well as for me? Save them with me, save them with me――with me, my Jesus! By thy Sacred Heart that broke for us, save us, have mercy on us!” And then, over and over, as if with some peculiar, long-sustained intention or compact, “Remember, O most pious Virgin Mary! Remember, remember!”

And there was one frequent supplication in which no name was mentioned, as if it were borne so constantly from her heart to the Sacred Heart that she had ceased to need to speak the name: “Gain thyself _that_ soul, my Jesus. By thy Cross, thy Heart, thy Mother, gain thyself _that_ soul.”

They heard only one petition for herself, but that so anguished, so desperate, that the strong man broke into sobs to hear it: one hungry cry for God’s holy sacraments, for God’s anointed priest, to come to her before her death, yet never uttered without a more intense prayer still――“My God, my God, _thy_ will be done, _thy_ will be done”; and even that was entirely merged at last in her prayers for those who had made her life one long agony at its close.

Suddenly she sat straight up in her bed, her eyes blazing as if with an unearthly, reflected light, her cheeks brilliant with more than the fever flush.

“Hark, hark, hark!” she said, with a ring of ecstatic joy through every word. “Do you not hear the sacring-bell? Kneel, all of you. The priest comes――comes with my Lord at last.”

Her eyes were fixed upon the door that no hand opened, yet she seemed to watch some one enter, and to see some one draw nearer, nearer to her, and she folded her hands reverently, and bent her head as if in adoration. They understood: she believed a priest was there; and they, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, of what she evidently was sure she saw and heard――they who watched her fell down upon their knees and hid their faces as in some divine presence. The next words that broke the stillness were the words of a dying penitent alone with a priest of God: “I confess to Almighty God and to you, my father.”

Steadily, as if for weeks she had prepared her soul for this in faith and penance, Esther Armstrong made her dying confession, with a contrition sore as if she were the lowest sinner in Gomorrah’s depths of sin, and then craved absolution humbly and in tears. When there was silence, and they dared to look at her, she was lying back among her pillows, whispering, “Forgiven, forgiven!”

They moved to give her nourishment, and the movement roused her, though not to recognition. She started up once more, lifting her hand.

“Hark, hark!” she said again. “Do you not hear him? He is saying Mass, and they sing sweetly as angels.”

All round the world, that Christmas day, one song of praise was rising, one pure offering was offered up to Him who was born and given for us on that day. Grand cathedrals were ablaze with lights and rich with bloom; far down the choir the altar tapers shone like stars through clouds of incense waving upward to the fretted roof, and the full tide of chant swelled high to join the chant of angels; in lowly chapel as in great cathedral the priest of God and the people of God adored the Holy Babe upon his Mother’s breast. In Gomorrah, in a decaying chapel, while oath and brawl sounded without, one soul heard seraphic music which no other ear could hear; one soul beheld a Priest whom no other eye could see――joined in his offering of the tremendous Sacrifice. For an hour, upheld by superhuman strength, she knelt upright, rapt in an ecstasy of spiritual communion that grew too deep for prayer. When the clock struck twelve, she said slowly, “_Ite missa est; Deo gratias_”; then, with a long-drawn, rapturous sigh, lay down again, but not as if she knew or remembered husband or child or friend.

The Doctor left her then, but at the close of the day he was summoned hastily, to see now without mistake that the battle of her life was almost ended.

“Stay with her, Doctor,” Reuben pleaded. “It’s a sore struggle. Try something more.”

“I can’t stay, man,” he answered. “There is no more to do. I’d give my right hand to save her; but I can’t see her suffer and be unable to help her. She’s the only white soul here, and now she is going.”

He turned to the bedside, and stood silently looking at the face with the dread shadow on it. Suddenly opening her eyes, her gaze fell first on him, and, startled out of her usual composure, she gave an irrepressible shudder. He understood what it meant. She had treated him always with perfect courtesy and confidence as her physician and true friend; he knew――for there had not been wanting those to tell him of it――that she had silenced with dignified rebuke the evil tales that more than one had tried to tell her of him, not because they disliked him, but because they loved to talk. But he knew also, what they did not, that in her pure heart she shrank from him, that his very presence was loathsome to her; and there had been times when, in her bodily weakness, she had been unable to control her aversion to his slightest touch. He had borne it quietly, humbling as it was, but it was doubly bitter to bear at the very last.

“I will bid you good-night, Mrs. Armstrong,” he said, trying hard to steady his voice. “You will not want me any more this evening, I think.”

“Good-by, Doctor,” she said, and he saw that she knew all.

“You will not want me,” he repeated mechanically.

“I want you――_there_,” she answered with a great effort. “Promise me that you will be there.”

He did not speak.

“Promise,” she repeated, and the tone brought back the memory of her prayers that morning. “I am dying――dying; and yet I cannot die. Night and day I prayed it: ‘Gain thyself _that_ soul, my Jesus. By thy Cross, thy Mother, thy broken Heart, gain thyself that soul.’ I prayed and prayed it; I am worn out with the praying, and yet I cannot die. Promise me to be there.”

The sweat stood on his forehead in great drops. “You do not know what you ask,” he cried. “There are sins enough upon me without adding that of a broken vow to you, and here. There is no saving a soul like mine.”

She did not answer him. She lifted up her eyes, away from him, away from earth, to God.

“Sacred Heart of my Jesus,” she prayed in agony, “win this soul, and let me die.”

For weeks he had kept himself sober and decent for her sake; now he had thought to rush out from her presence, to drown his grief in viler sin than ever; and, lo! she was still holding him, was binding eternal chains upon him, to draw him away from corruption unto God. As a physician he knew that it was a case where a mighty will alone was keeping life in a body nearly dead; it would have been an awful sight to see, even had he had no interest in it. She was living only to win him unto immortal life. Angels and devils may well have stood still before that struggle, where one dauntless soul at the point of death held Satan’s power at bay.

“I promise,” he said at last, as if the words were wrung from him. “But pray for me always.”

“The Mother of God prays for you,” she said with strange emphasis. “Call upon Jesus and Mary night and day. You will not need me.”

And then he saw that she needed him no longer, thought of him no longer, and he went away.

Reuben Armstrong shut and locked the door behind him. There was no more that science or skill could do. Now, for one brief hour, Esther was his alone. The eyes which the Doctor had seen grow dim to him lit up with untired affection as Reuben drew near the bed; a look of rest came over her, and she signed to him to lay her baby on her arm.

“My baby, my little Christmas baby,” she murmured tenderly. “Did the priest baptize her this morning, Reuben? Oh! how could you overlook it, dear? Then you must do it. Now――now!”

There was an excited ring in her voice, and Reuben hastened to do at once what he had felt from the first must soon be done; for the baby’s life evidently hung upon a thread. A few drops of water, a few divine words, and Esther’s eyes shone exultingly upon her child.

“She will never be anything but God’s child,” she said. “Oh! I am glad she cannot live. It is the other children, that are not his, that you must care for, Reuben.”

“No, no!” he cried. “No, Esther, I cannot live without you.”

“Listen, Reuben,” she said. Lying there with her child upon her arm, she looked like a vision of the Holy Mother herself, and when she spoke her voice had a tone in it which seemed divinely sweet. “Listen, Reuben. This place is God’s. He wants it. You must live and not die――_for him_.”

“O Esther!” he sobbed, “not without you――not without you.”

“Yes, Reuben, without me――all alone. My darling, my darling, save these little children’s souls for God.”

One greater than she spoke, on that holy night, through Esther’s lips, and touched and won her husband’s wounded heart.

“I will, Esther,” he sobbed. “I will try hard”; and even then, upon that solemn parting, as if to stamp the promise with an awful seal, the tavern clamor broke shrill and vile upon the Christmas air.

How long it was that she spoke no word――wrapped for the last time in her passion of intercession――Reuben did not notice; he only knelt on beside her, living upon every breath she drew. But, at the turn of the night, she looked full at him, clasped both his hands in hers, spoke so that the voice and the words rang in his heart through all his after-life――spoke not to him, but for him, and her words were those of the _Memorare_. Then, like one who has laid down for ever in most safe and tender keeping a heavy burden borne long and painfully, she crossed her hands upon her heart, but not now as if in pain; a look of glad surprise came upon her face.

“Hark!” she said. “He is coming _again_. My Lord and my God!”

When the Doctor entered Reuben’s cabin next morning, he found it in perfect order――the baby asleep in its cradle beside the hearth; Esther lying in a sort of funeral state, all done for her that could be done; and beside her knelt Reuben, whom the Doctor scarcely recognized at first for the change upon him. In that night he had become an old man, and his friend believed that but for the baby’s sake he would have died; yet, two days later, the baby died, and still Reuben lived.

* * * * *

“A poor fool!” people called him. He had lost all interest in temporal matters, seemed hardly to know the use of money, and barely supported himself by the odd bits of work which he did for the idle women from house to house. Soon, however, they discovered that he had one talent, and that was for managing children. A woman one day suggested to him that he should “bide at home, and mind some babies for ’em, to keep ’em out of harm’s way; and he might teach the five-year-olds their letters, too――being fit for naught else,” she added in a tone as clear as that she used for the other words; but Reuben did not mind.

The proposal met with general favor; the women promised to supply him with meals from their own poor tables, “better than he’d get hisself, anyhow,” they said; and that was all he needed to keep him through the winter.

It seemed at first sight a very forlorn life. Where others less careless and simple could have lived in comfort, he lived in cold and hunger; one by one everything which he had brought from his distant home disappeared――given away to people in distress, or yielded without question to exorbitant and unfounded demands. Yet that bare, poverty-stricken room grew to be the one fair place in Gomorrah. There, for long hours of the winter days, might be seen a cluster of children gathered about a man who seemed in some respects as much a child as any of them, and who taught them to be tidy and affectionate and good. A few learned their letters, but many learned their prayers, and the babies often said for their first word the name of Jesus, and all came to gaze lovingly upon the crucifix, and touch with pitying reverence the wounded hands and feet. Often the parents heard from childish lips the story of the Infant Saviour. No home now with a child in it where Sunday was not known. Men and women, large boys and girls, swore and fought in the streets still, but it soon became a rare sight to see a little child so forget itself; it would make Master Reuben sorry, and he said that it made the Heart of Jesus bleed. No one stopped him at such work; he was too poor a fool for them to mind him.

But he had another work with which they meddled much. The promise which the Doctor had made by Esther’s death-bed was not forgotten by him who made it, but it was broken again and again. His own lower nature which had ruled him all his life would have been enough, and more than enough, for such a man to struggle against; but, besides that, the fiends in human shape who peopled Gomorrah seemed leagued with invisible evil ones to work his utter ruin. They scoffed at his feeble efforts to do right; they lured him or they maddened him――it was all one to them――into the old haunts of temptation; and the very efforts which he made to escape, the very memory of Esther’s words and holy looks, the very thought of purity and self-control, seemed to make the evil deadlier and grosser, when, after sore struggle, he gave way.

And he did struggle, he did pray, poor soul! There were hours when he lay upon the earth in some cold hut or in the open air, fighting, it seemed to him, with no less than Satan’s self. But he had been a slave to self too long and too deliberately to be able to gain freedom easily. Scenes of the past rose before him; he knew himself in his true degradation. Sins about which a kind of lurid fascination can be thrown in books or real life for a time he saw more and more plainly in their actual shape and color, and it drove him mad with disgust and shame. Few were daring enough that winter to trust their sick folk to his skill. For days together he would join in riot and carousal, till _delirium tremens_ followed, and then strong men fled in fear before him.

But when that time came, and houses were locked tight and no one else dared face him as he went raging about the town, falling on the uneven streets, bruising and wounding himself, there was one who did go out to meet him. A tottering, feeble creature went meekly forth, stood in his path, took blows and curses without resistance, and presently――no one knew by what magic spell――led him to his own poor cabin and locked himself in with him alone.

That was the reason why Master Reuben never did what his tender and lonely heart yearned to do――to make a home for the orphan children of Gomorrah. No one but himself must be allowed to see what passed in his cabin while the Doctor was there; no one else must be exposed to the dangers he had to meet. But the room where they had watched the mysterious joy of Esther’s Christmas feast saw far other sights and echoed to far other sounds than angel music as the winter wore away. There were mornings when no children came to Reuben’s house, when some woman more pitiful, some man more brave than the others, crept near and laid food on the threshold, then fled away to tell in trembling of the cries they had heard as of some wild beast mad with fury, or some lost soul shrieking in the torment of despair. Sometimes, too, they told of blows or noises like a heavy fall; and often, when Reuben came among them again, he bore marks that proved the stories true, but they never learned the cause from him.

And he――as the winter passed, the only truly happy faces that Gomorrah saw were Reuben Armstrong’s and little children’s. By and by they heard him sing sweet carols and hymns and chants; he taught the children to sing with him, and used to lead them down the streets, and into the snowy fields, and to visit Esther’s grave, to the sound of holy song. People stopped in many an evil deed or word to listen; then left the word unsaid, the deed undone. It came to be a fashion in Gomorrah to stroll to Reuben’s cabin of a Sunday to see how joyfully the children kept the day. Nay, it was even known that once a whole party at the tavern had left their drinking-cups, to stand for an hour at the next door, listening to the music. Truly, good and evil were in strange contrast that winter in the almost forgotten place which had no intercourse with the outer world. There was a world, unseen, in which it was remembered night and day.

At length they asked Reuben why he looked so happy, and he answered: “It is almost spring. Then the priest will come.” And when they laughed and asked him how he knew, he answered simply: “God will send him.”

When the snow began to melt and the streams ran gayly down the hillside, and grass was green, one week, remembered for years after in that region, the whole place rang with the story of a carousal which even Gomorrah wondered at; the whole place waited to see whether the Doctor or Reuben would ever come forth alive from their self-imposed prison. When Reuben opened his door again, and gathered his children round him, there was a look of peculiar expectation on his face. He greeted each child with special gladness, and told one of the mothers that he was quite sure the priest was coming very soon, “for we need him a good deal now,” he said.

That afternoon there came into Gomorrah a man wearing the religious habit, and asked at the tavern if a Mrs. Armstrong was living in that place.

Syles stared at him blankly. “What do you know of her?” he said.

“I met some one,” the priest answered, “while on my way to the States, who begged me, if I ever came this way, to find such a woman and give her a message from him. Is she here?”

“Dead,” said Syles briefly.

“She had a husband. Where is he?”

“Next door with a madman. We leave him alone such times.”

“No, no, Parson,” said a lounger near by. “Where’ve ye been that ye haven’t heard? Doctor’s out of his fit to-day, and Reuben’s got his school again. I’ll take ye there, stranger. It’s a sight we’re proud of in Gomorrah.”

Out of the tavern into the filthy street, followed by a dozen or more wretches, the priest went sadly with a load upon his heart. The horrors he had seen already were enough to sicken him; he wondered what new evils he would meet with now of which Gomorrah was proud.

“They’re used to spectators,” said his guide. “We watch ’em as we like. Door or window――’tan’t no difference to them; we an’t particular here.”

It was a bare, small room, with a table and some benches, an empty fireplace, beside it a powerfully-built man trembling and crying by himself, like one unnerved by some long illness; on one wall was a print of the Blessed Babe and the Holy Mother, and below this was a crucifix. Facing these was a band of twenty little children in soiled and ragged garments, but with clean hands and faces, too absorbed by what was being said to them to heed what passed without. All eyes were fixed on a small man with a great fresh cut across his forehead and a bruised and very simple face.

“Yes, children,” he was saying, “it was the blessed child Jesus who was born on Christmas night. He loves us all very much indeed, and of course we all want to love him. Some time he is going to send his priest here to baptize you; then what will you all be?”

“God’s little children.” The answer rose sweetly and with a kind of merriment from every lip, and Reuben’s face shone.

“Surely, surely,” he said. “Now we will sing, because we love him and want to thank him. Yes, I know the song you want――‘The Three Poor Shepherds.’”

“We were but three poor shepherds,
All keeping our flocks by night,
When Monseigneur the blessed angel
Came suddenly into sight――

“Came suddenly through the darkness,
While a glory round him fell;
I wot not if it were Michael
Or the Angel Gabriel.

“But his voice was like a trumpet,
So full, and glad, and true;
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘my children:
There is good news for you――’

“‘Good news for men and maidens,
A great, glad gift for them;
For the faire Sire Christ, the blessed,
Is born in Bethlehem.’

“Then a _Gloria in Excelsis_
They sang with glad accord;
Peace and good-will to all mankind
From the Sire Christ the Lord.

“And unto a lowly stable
Silently went we three,
And there the kine, each in its stall,
Was on a bended knee.

“And there was Messire St. Joseph;
And Mary the mother lay,
With the Holy Child in swaddling bands,
All on a cushion of hay.

“Each dumb beast looked in our faces,
But never unbent the knee;
Our sweet Ladye she raised her eyes
And smiled full tenderly.

“‘Ah! faire Sire Christ,’ all humbly
We cried with urgent plea,
‘Anneal us now of thy great mercie,
For that we are so glad of thee.’

“‘For that we are glad and joyful
That good days are begun,
That the great God for a blessing
Hath sent us his faire Childe Son.’

“Then Our Ladye the Holy Mary
Took some wood in her hand,
And crossed the pieces, and gave them,
That we all might understand.

“And we kissed the token humbly,
And bowed before the Childe;
For we knew, like Monseigneurs the angels,
That God had been reconciled.

“So joyfully and with gladness
All softly we went our way,
And with many an old _Te Deum_
We tell the tale to-day.”

Then once more, like a chorus which even the children just beginning to talk seemed to know in part:

“For that we are glad and joyful
That good days are begun,
That the great God for a blessing
Hath sent us his faire Childe Son.”

The door opened slowly and a voice which all ears could hear said reverently, “_Pax vobiscum_.” The good days were begun.

Strange how calmly they all received him! Reuben never asked him how he came there; he had looked for him and prayed for him a long while, and he was there at last. God, of course, had sent him. One by one he brought the children to speak with him, and to have him pronounce on their fitness to be made God’s children; and the tears stood in the priest’s eyes as he listened to their simple, fearless answers, that witnessed to what Reuben’s work of faith had been. When they were gone away to their homes, which were far less homes to them than Reuben’s cabin was, Reuben came to the priest as simply as any one of them had come, and asked to be allowed to make confession.

“You’ll stay here and be good, Doctor,” he said soothingly. “I shall only be in the other room, and I’ve locked the door hard.”

The Doctor made a sort of moaning assent.

“He’s just had a very sad time,” explained Reuben, “and he needs you very much, father. By and by please let him speak to you.”

How wonderful to listen, in that place of revenge and murder, to Reuben’s quiet, brief confession――no complaints, no bitterness, no anger, except that for one day he had felt hatred toward some one, against whom, however, he brought no accusation, and for this sin he felt especial contrition.

“I met lately,” the priest said slowly, when the confession was finished, and marking with care the effect his words would have, “a man known sometimes as Lazell.”

Reuben gave a start as of joyful surprise, and would have spoken, but the priest continued:

“I saw him die a felon’s death upon the gallows.”

“No, no!” cried Reuben in distress――one might have supposed he had been told of a brother’s shameful death. “Oh! no, father.”

“It was a just punishment,” the priest replied.

“No, no!” cried Reuben. “You do not know this place. They do not have helps here like other people, or like me. Oh! but God saved his poor soul at the last?”

“He spoke to me,” said the priest, “of a woman named Esther Armstrong, to whom he had done a great injury. Was not that true?”

“He did not understand,” said Reuben with sorrowful compassion――“I am sure he did not understand what harm he did, because, you know, he _couldn’t_ have hurt _her_. And he did not see good women here; they have such hard times here, poor things.”

“He said he could not forget her――that something always reminded him of her. He begged me to find her out and ask her to forgive him.”

“She died,” said Reuben softly. “She forgave him. She prayed for him a great deal, I think.”

“God answered her, then,” the priest said. “I trust that he repented truly.”

A great light of joy woke upon Reuben’s face. “Then he will save the rest,” he exclaimed triumphantly.

“But you,” the priest asked――“do you forgive him?”

“I?” repeated Reuben with a puzzled look. “O father! it was very wrong of me; I was angry with him at first. But it was my fault, really, though Esther never blamed me; I was a poor fool, father, or I never should have brought her here.”

And so Reuben Armstrong took to himself his lifelong title humbly――so poor a fool, indeed, that he had forgotten that he had anything to forgive his fellow-men.

The next day Reuben saw his whole flock of little ones gathered into the Good Shepherd’s fold; and then the Holy Sacrifice was offered up, and Reuben’s soul was strengthened by the Divine Food.

The Doctor had sullenly refused to be present. Reuben found him, on his return, lying face downwards on the cabin floor, the picture of despair.

“There is no hope,” he said when Reuben knelt by him, and begged him to have recourse to confession. “I want drink――nothing but drink. I must have it. I cannot save myself.”

“That’s true enough,” said Reuben. “You can’t, and I can’t, but God can. You keep saying that I don’t know everything about you, and that nobody does, and that God will never forgive you. But he has sent his priest at last, and you need not be afraid to say anything to him. You must not hide anything, and he has the power to hear it and tell you what God says.”

Like one driven to a last resort, the Doctor turned to the waiting priest, and Reuben in the next room gave thanks and prayed, while, in the place where a saint had made her last confession, this man, who was indeed of “the scum of sinners,” made his first.

Truly, the Sacrament of Penance is a divine and awful thing. God grant that they who vilify and reject and misrepresent it know not what they do! The burden of souls which a missionary priest in the far West has to bear in the confessional is a tremendous one; this priest had been in prison-hulks of Australia, and through all the mining regions of California and Arizona, yet had never met a case so desperate as that before him now, where hope seemed so hopeless, the power for better things so nearly overcome. But the poor penitent, as one by one without reserve he revealed the sins so long kept secret, as well as those that were known of men and noised abroad, felt keen relief through all the degradation, tasted somewhat of the sweetness hid in this sacrament of blessed bitterness, won from it that strength which is a better thing to have than joy or consolation, met there and knew there Him “at whose feet Mary Magdalene came to kneel in the house of Simon the leper.”

“I am going away, Reuben,” the Doctor said that night, abruptly and sadly. “Yes,” seeing the other’s look of surprise, “there is hope for me, perhaps, but not here.”

“Away?” Reuben repeated. “Away from me? I thought I’d have you always, Doctor.”

“To be the hurt and the trouble I have been to you?” said the Doctor, deeply touched. “No, no, Reuben, I cannot keep my promise here. I must leave the past entirely, and the old associates, and go where I can repent――if I ever can. There is no such thing as an easy repentance for me.” And Reuben felt in his tender heart, once more to be bereaved, that the words were true.

When the priest left Gomorrah the next day, promising that it should not be forgotten, one went with him for whom no other hope remained but the total surrender of will and liberty, the total crucifixion of the flesh. Reuben heard from him once, in the course of his journey, then all tidings ceased; but he was too simple and too busy to wonder at it, too full of faith to doubt the final triumph. His character was not like Esther’s; the burden of souls could never be to him what it had been to her; God led him by a different path from that she trod in pain.

But in a lonely monastery, high up among frowning rocks and perpetual snows, a man who had come to it from far across the seas lived, for a few sad years, a life of deepest penance. Never by day or night did the battle with evil cease, yet over him there seemed to be by day and night a special heavenly care. That lonely cell was haunted constantly by visions of the past, by temptations that were maddening, by thoughts and words of evil import, which an increasing approach to holiness made flesh and heart shrink to recall. No sign of the cross, no prayer, no penance, could banish them. Pursued, haunted, tempted to the very end, yet to the very end he called on Jesus, Mary, and to the very end the answer came.

None but those whose lives were one of close union with the Sacred Heart of Jesus dared minister at that death-bed, learning there, in fear and trembling, new lessons of the hideousness of sin, and of the power which an evil life can give to Satan in the hour of death. But again and again they heard the poor lips whisper, “I deserve it, I deserve it; I thank God”; they saw the weak hands cling to the crucifix, the glaring eyes gaze in their anguish upon the Word made flesh; and he who endured to hear the last confession brought to him afterward, with awed and pitying reverence, the Body of the Lord. It was no saint, no life-long, scarred, victorious warrior of the Cross, whom they laid to rest at last, his hard fight done; yet over that body――which, even in their snow-clad region, they had to hurry to its burial――they dared to give God thanks in humble faith for another sinner ransomed.

Humbly and faithfully, in far-away Gomorrah, Reuben Armstrong lived to a good old age his poor fool’s life; and men and women came to look with gentle reverence upon the feeble form which went in and out among them on errands of daily mercy, never tiring. By and by the neighbors learned to know the place by a better name than the evil one which it grew to hate rather than glory in. “It cannot be so very bad,” they said, “when there are such good children in it.” And as from time to time a priest came there, he always found one more soul desirous for confession, or one more child or grown person ready for holy baptism, and Reuben never again knelt alone to receive holy Communion.

When the Doctor went away, Reuben opened his heart and home to the vagrant orphans, and there, some years after, he welcomed gladly the miserable Parson, more pitiably needy than any of them. “Master Reuben’s baby” they called him, and Reuben often told exultingly how good and obedient he was. No one envied him his charge――unless it was the angels, who share in such blessed work.

A railroad runs through the town now, and it is becoming a place of some importance――poor enough and bad enough, alas! but stamped outwardly and openly with the sign of the Cross. For over Esther’s grave loving hands have reared a little chapel――a constant token that the offering of her broken heart has been accepted, that her dying prayer has been _remembered_.

And there, troubled by no doubts and haunted by no fears, weak in body and weaker still in intellect, but very strong in his immortal soul, Reuben waits patiently and happily till his work is done.

THREE LECTURES ON EVOLUTION.

We live in a time when scientific men seem to acquire celebrity almost in proportion as they succeed in perverting the conclusions of natural science so as to make them contradict revealed truth. At this we are not surprised; for the management of the interests of science has lately fallen, to a great extent, into the hands of an anti-Christian sect, which is either unable to understand or unwilling to recognize the testimony that nature bears to the existence, power, and wisdom of its Creator, and to the veracity of his word. To this sect Professor Huxley belongs. They call him “a great scientist” and “a great philosopher”; and people invite him to lecture; and a certain press hastens to publish his thoughts, that the world may learn how religious dogmas can be swept away by “scientific” discoveries, and especially by “scientific” reasonings. Unfortunately for Prof. Huxley, his lectures on the _Evidences of Evolution_, which are the last effort of his mind, are as deficient in logic as most of his other productions. In other words, the conclusions of the lecturer are not legitimate, and the premises themselves are not always exempt from objectionable features. We hardly need tell our readers that neither any Christian dogma has been swept away by these lectures nor any evolution established, except in so far as the lectures themselves may be considered as an evolution of sophistry.

In the first of his three lectures Prof. Huxley begins with a false statement of facts:

“It has taken long indeed, and accumulations of often
fruitless labor, to enable men to look steadily at the
glaring phantasmagoria of nature, to notice her fluctuations
and what is regular among her apparent irregularities; and
it is only comparatively lately, within the last few
centuries, that there has emerged the conception of a
pervading order and definite force of things, which we term
the course of nature. But out of this contemplation of
nature, and out of man’s thought concerning her, there has
in these later times arisen that conception of the constancy
of nature to which I have referred, and that at length has
become the guiding conception of modern thought. It has
ceased to be almost conceivable to any person who has paid
attention to modern thought that chance should have any
place in the universe, or that events should follow anything
but the natural order of cause and effect.”

The truth is that “modern thought” has had no part whatever in the discovery of the constancy of nature. This discovery is as old as mankind. All ancient philosophers, even before Aristotle, knew the constancy of the natural laws, and this knowledge has never died away, that modern thinkers should claim the honor of reviving it. The same is to be said of “the conception of a pervading order and definite force of things,” as we find that old Greek and Latin books are full of this conception, which is likewise common to all our mediæval writers, and, indeed, to all reasonable men. That “chance” could have no place in the universe was so well known to the ancients that Cicero emphatically declared any man to be silly who would suspect the possibility of the contrary.[152] Hence no person ever needed “to pay attention to modern thought” to conceive that chance could have no place in the government of the world. Finally, that events cannot but follow “the natural order of cause and effect” is the oldest of scientific truths, and the first principle of scientific reasoning. A lecturer who pretends that we owe these truths to “modern thought” shows no respect for his audience. On the other hand, if “modern thought” is so poor and barren that it envies the scientific claims of past generations, and stakes its reputation on fiction and plagiarism, what can we say of the wisdom of the modern thinker who affords a ground for arguing that “modern thought” stands convicted of dishonesty as much as of incapacity?

The professor a little later says:

“Though we are quite clear about the constancy of nature at
the present time and in the present order of things, it by
no means follows necessarily that we are justified in
expanding this generalization into the past, and in denying
absolutely that there may have been a time when evidence did
not follow a first order, when the relations of cause and
effect were not fixed and definite, and when external
agencies did not intervene in the general course of nature.
Cautious men will admit that such a change in the order of
nature may have been possible, just as every candid thinker
will admit that there may be a world in which two and two do
not make four, and in which two straight lines do not
enclose a space.”

This sentence shows that we are dealing rather with an empiricist than with a natural philosopher. Why should not the constancy of nature at the present time justify our conviction that nature has been no less constant in the past? Surely, if we proceed only empirically, the facts of the present will teach us nothing certain as to the facts of a remote and unknown past. But it is remarkable that this purely empirical method would leave us equally uncertain as to the facts of the future, though modern scientists assure us that “the future must be similar to the past.” The truth is that no valid induction can be made from mere facts without the aid of a rational principle as the ground of our generalization. If such a principle is certain, our inference is certain; and if the principle is only plausible, our inference will be plausible in the same degree. Now, have we not a certain principle from which the constancy of nature can be demonstrated with no reference to particular time? We have such a principle. We infer the constancy of nature from the constancy of the agencies by which the physical order is ruled. All elementary substances are permanent; their matter and their active power are never impaired; the law of their activity is as fixed and definite as their permanent constitution; and therefore they do not, and they cannot, act at present in a different manner from that in which they have acted from the beginning, or from that in which they will act as long as they last. This is the principle by which we are fully justified in extending the constancy of nature to all antiquity and to all futurity, and in averring that such a constancy is not an accidental result of circumstances, but a necessary consequence of the principle of causality.

But Mr. Huxley seems not to understand this principle. He imagines a time when the relations of cause and effect may not have been fixed and definite, and even conceives the possibility of a world in which two and two do not make four. This is modern thought indeed; for we do not believe that any indication can be found of a similar thought having ever been entertained in past ages. But we would ask: If in a certain world two and two did not make four, how could Mr. Huxley know that they make four in this world? And if the relations of cause and effect had at any given time remained vague and indefinite, how could he account for the fact that they are now definite and fixed? For the relation of cause and effect consists in this: that the impression produced by the cause is the exact equivalent of the exertion made in its production; and he who imagines a time when such a relation was not fixed and definite must assume that an effect can be greater than the exertion in which it originates, or that the exertion can be greater than the impression it produces. But if so, on what ground can the professor affirm that the relation of cause and effect has now become fixed and definite? We see the effect, but we cannot see the exertion; we see the fall of a body, but we cannot see the action of gravity. How, then, can Mr. Huxley ascertain that the action of gravity is neither greater nor less than the momentum impressed on the body? Thus the relation of cause and effect, in his theory, cannot be known; and mechanical science becomes impossible. In the same manner, if, in another world, two and two do not make four, mathematics are an imposition.

The lecturer says also that there may have been a time “when external agencies did not intervene in the general course of nature”; but we believe that this must be a _lapsus linguæ_; for, as he does not admit that external agencies do now intervene in the general course of nature, to say that the case may have been exactly the same in all remote times is not to adduce a reason of the supposed disturbance of the relations of cause and effect, of which he is speaking, nor would it serve to limit, as he wishes, our “generalization.” The context, therefore, shows that what the lecturer intended to say was that there may have been a time when external agencies _did_ intervene in the general course of nature. In fact, however, he said the contrary. Perhaps the professor, considering that he was speaking to an American audience with whose religious opinions he was little acquainted, thought it wise to give such a turn to his phrases as to avoid all profession of belief or disbelief in the existence of a Creator. But, however this may be, the idea that God’s intervention in the course of nature would disturb the relation of cause and effect is quite preposterous; for if God intervenes, his action carries with itself its proportionate effect, while the actions of other causes maintain their natural relations to their ordinary effects. When a man raises a stone from the ground, does he disturb the relation of cause and effect? or does he abolish gravitation? Certainly not. Gravity continues to urge down the body, while it is raised; but the effect corresponds to the combined actions of the two distinct causes. Now, the same must be said of God’s intervention with natural causes. The effect will always correspond to the combined causalities; and therefore the relation of the effect to its adequate cause remains undisturbed.

To assume, as the lecturer does, that at the present time God has ceased to intervene in the course of nature, is to assume something for which there is not the least warrant. God’s intervention in the course of nature is continuous; for without it nature can neither act nor exist for a single moment, as every one knows who is not absolutely ignorant of philosophy. But this is not all. God, seeing that men try to blind themselves to the fact of his intervention in the ordinary course of nature, gives us in his mercy not unfrequent proofs of his intervention by works so far above nature that no effort of scientific infidels can evade their testimony. These works are _miracles_. “Modern thought” denies miracles, as irreconcilable with the “constancy of nature”; but the history of the church is full of well-authenticated miracles, and there are to-day living in different countries thousands of unexceptionable witnesses who can testify that miracles are, even now, an almost daily occurrence among the Christian people. We, too, admit “the constancy of nature,” but we are not so dull as to interpret this constancy as modern thought strives to interpret it. It is the _laws_ of nature that are constant, not the _course_ of nature; the former alone are connected with the essence of things and are immutable; the latter depends on accidental conditions, and can be interfered with not only by God, but even by man, as daily experience shows. Hence the intervention of external agencies does not impair the constancy of nature, and the argument of modern thinkers against the possibility of miracles falls to the ground.

Mr. Huxley, after stating that the question with which he has to deal is essentially historical, affirms that “there are only three views――three hypotheses――respecting the past history of nature.” The first hypothesis is that

“The order of nature which now obtains has always obtained;
in other words, that the present course of nature, the
present order of things, has existed from all eternity. The
second hypothesis is that the present state of things, the
present order of nature, has had only a limited duration,
and that at some period in the past the state of things
which we now know――substantially, though not, of course, in
all its details, the state of things which we now
know――arose and came into existence without any precedent
similar condition from which it could have proceeded. The
third hypothesis also assumes that the present order of
nature has had but a limited duration, but it supposes that
the present order of things proceeded by a natural process
from an antecedent order, and that from another antecedent
order, and so on; and that on this hypothesis the attempt to
fix any limit at which we could assign the commencement of
this series of changes is given up.”

Of these three hypotheses, the first is discarded by the lecturer as untenable, because “circumstantial evidence absolutely negatives the conception of the eternity of the present condition of things.” In this we agree with him, not only on account of geological evidence, but also, and principally, because the world is mutable, and therefore contingent; which proves that it must have had a beginning. It is remarkable that he denies the eternity of the present condition of things, but does not deny the eternity of matter. Modern thought could not admit of such a denial; because, if matter is not eternal, the admission of a Creator becomes unavoidable.

The second hypothesis the professor calls the “Miltonic” hypothesis, and he proceeds to explain why he calls it so:

“I doubt not that it may have excited some surprise in your
minds that I should have spoken of this as Milton’s
hypothesis rather than I should choose the terms which are
much more familiar to you, such as ‘the doctrine of
creation,’ or ‘the Biblical doctrine’ or ‘the doctrine of
Moses,’ all of which terms, as applied to the hypothesis to
which I have just referred, are certainly much more familiar
to you than the title of the Miltonic hypothesis. But I have
had what I cannot but think are very weighty reasons for
taking the course which I have pursued. For example, I have
discarded the title of the hypothesis of creation, because
my present business is not with the question as to how
nature has originated, as to the causes which have led to
her origination, but as to the manner and order of her
origination. Our present inquiry is not why the objects
which constitute nature came into existence, but when they
came into existence, and in what order. This is a strictly
historical question, as that about the date at which the
Angles and Jutes invaded England. But the other question
about creation is a philosophical question, and one which
cannot be solved or approached or touched by the historical
method.”

Then he gives his reasons why he avoids the title of Biblical hypothesis:

“In the first place, it is not my business to say what the
Hebrew text contains, and what it does not; and, in the
second place, were I to say that this was the Biblical
hypothesis, I should be met by the authority of many eminent
scholars, to say nothing of men of science, who, in recent
times, have absolutely denied that this doctrine is to be
found in Genesis at all. If we are to listen to them, we
must believe that what seem so clearly defined as days of
creation――as if very great pains had been taken that there
should be no mistake――that these are not days at all, but
periods that we may make just as long as convenience
requires. We are also to understand that it is consistent
with that phraseology to believe that plants and animals may
have been evolved by natural processes, lasting for millions
of years, out of similar rudiments. A person who is not a
Hebrew scholar can only stand by and admire the marvelous
flexibility of a language which admits of such diverse
interpretations.” (At these last words the audience is said
to have laughed and applauded.) “In the third place, I have
carefully abstained from speaking of this as a Mosaic
doctrine, because we are now assured upon the authority of
the highest critics, and even of dignitaries of the church,
that there is no evidence whatever that Moses ever wrote
this chapter or knew anything about it. I don’t say――I give
no opinion――it would be an impertinence upon my part to
volunteer an opinion on such a subject; but that being the
state of opinion among the scholars and the clergy, it is
well for us, the laity, who stand outside, to avoid
entangling ourselves in such a vexed question.”

Then the lecturer makes a short refutation of Milton’s hypothesis, and concludes his first lecture by promising to give in the following lectures the evidences in favor of the hypothesis of evolution.

It seems to us that the whole of the preceding reasoning is nothing but plausible talk, and that the explanations of the lecturer lack sincerity. First, he pretends that the “doctrine of creation” is a philosophical question, which cannot be solved by the historical method. Why can it not? Creation is no less a historical than a philosophical fact. The book in which we read it is a historical book, more than three thousand years old, whose high authority has been recognized by the wisest men of all past generations, and whose truthfulness has been confirmed by monuments of antiquity and by the study of profane histories. If, then, Prof. Huxley was truly anxious to follow the historical method, why did he not compare the details given in Genesis about the manner and order of the origination of nature with the manner and order suggested by geological discoveries? On the other hand, if the question was to be treated by the historical method, was it wise to appeal to a poet as the best interpreter of history?